Nicholas II of Russia

Nicholas II of Russia (18 May 1868-17 July 1918) was the last Czar of the Russian Empire, reigning from 1 November 1894 to 15 March 1917, succeeding Czar Alexander III of Russia. Nicholas was the last monarch of the House of Romanov, and he was killed along with his wife, son, and four daughters after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Biography
Nicholas Aleksandrovich Romanov was born on 18 May 1868 to Crown Prince Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Romanov and Dagmar of Denmark in the Alexander Palace of Tsarskoye Selo in St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. Nicholas was the nephew of King George I of Greece, King Frederik VIII of Denmark, and King Edward VII of Britain and the cousin of King Constantine I of Greece, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King Haakon VII of Norway, and King George V of Britain.

In 1881, he became Tsarevich (Crown Prince) after the death of his grandfather Czar Alexander II of Russia, whom he saw dying of his wounds from an anarchist bomb attack on him in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Nicholas married Alix of Hesse in June 1894 after two proposals, having convinced her that Lutheranism and Eastern Orthodoxy were not so different, calming her complaints about conversion. In November, his father died, and Nicholas became the new Czar of the Russian Empire.

Nicholas' reign was a disaster from the fourth day; on 30 May 1894, a crowd of 500,000 Russian peasants stampeded at the Khodynka Field at his coronation ceremony when bread, beer, gingerbread, pretzels, and commemorative cups were handed out to the guests as gifts. Nicholas made further bad moves when he decided to lead the massacre of many Russian Jews in pogroms (primarily in Poland, Ukraine, and Moldavia). In 1905, he brutally crushed the 1905 Revolution, a failed attempt by mutinous soldiers, sailors, and communists to overthrow the government. At the same time, however, he failed in his attempts to maintain control of Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War against Japan, and in 1906 he was forced to sign the Treaty of Portsmouth, which let Japan take over the only Russian warm water port of Port Arthur. Nicholas recovered from this humiliation by allying with the United Kingdom in 1907, and the Anglo-Russian Entente ended the "Great Game" conflict over Persia and the Middle East in between British India and Russian Kokand.

On 1 August 1914, Czar Nicholas made an important decision that would decide the future of Europe. On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a Serbian ultranationalist group (the Black Hand) assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. As a result Austria's ally, the German Empire, declared war on Serbia to stand by their loyal ally. Nicholas was allied with Serbia, so he decided to mobilize 12,000,000 Imperial Russian Army troops. Germany and Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on 1 August, and within three days, they also declared war on Russia's ally of France and France's allies of the United Kingdom and Belgium. Czar Nicholas' army suffered several losses in 1914 against the Germans in Poland, losing the Battle of Tannenberg and the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. As a result of these defeats, the Imperial German Army was able to occupy Poland and much of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and the country of Belarus. Russia fought some successful battles against Austria-Hungary in Galicia, but they suffered many losses. In 1916, Czar Nicholas II took command of the Russian army, leaving his wife in Moscow. Queen Alexandra had an affair with the mystic Grigori Rasputin, who was a pretentious healer and mystic from Siberia that she believed to have saved their son Alexei Nikolaevich from his hemophilia through prayer. Rasputin had inappropriate, and sometimes sexual, encounters with the Czarina and her daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, leading to his assassination by Prince Felix Yusupov in late 1916.

By 1917, the Russians were losing the war. 3,300,000 Russian troops were killed in World War I, and in February 1917 the communist Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin led the Russian Revolution against him. The Bolsheviks seized power through a coup d'etat and established the Russian SFSR, and the Czar and his wife and children were put in exile as the new Russia made peace with the Central Powers and left World War I. Czar Nicholas and his family eventually wound up in Ekaterinburg in the mountains of Ural, and they were held under house arrest. Nicholas was abused by the guards, and some Bolshevik troops threw sticks into the spools of his bicycle, making him fall off - he was no longer their Czar, so they could bully him. On 17 July 1918, Czar Nicholas, his wife, their daughters, his son, and some servants were taken to the basement of their house by some guards, who told them that protesters in the street were causing trouble. There, they were arranged in position for a photograph, but instead, they were shot dead. All of them were buried in an unmarked grave, only fully analyzed in 1998, eighty years after their deaths.